My work is the story of life, my people, our land and our cultural ways.

I have a proud heritage.
My mother is Ngarrindjeri and my father is Kukutha.
As a child I travelled throughout South Australia between my fathers country and my mothers country. I have learned many things from both sides of my family and so my work speaks about the bush, the rivers, mainly the Murray and the Coorong in South Australia.
I often went hunting with my father and my uncles. We would hunt for emu, kangaroo, wombat and various other smaller animals. All these are depicted in my work. I learned many skills. We only had one opportunity to get the animal so you had to be spot on or go hungry. The animals didn't wait around to give you a second go. We never killed for sport only for food. We killed to feed ourselves and that was the proper way to do it. And we used all the animal skins, sinews and some bones.
My paintings depict the stories and scenes of my hunting experiences in my youth and what I saw when I went hunting with my dad and uncle. I spent a lot of time looking and learning the bush and the animals. Often when dad had to go away I used to stay with my uncle who then become my family and I learnt many hunting skills from my uncle who taught me how to survive in the bush. These experiences are what I paint on canvas and on boomerangs.
Boomerangs can be very accurate at a distance of about 40 –-50 metres.
The spear is for long range hunting and we extended the speed and the
distance by attaching a woomera. You can see spears and woomeras on my boomerangs and some paintings. They are always carried by hunters.
The different colours that I paint with are part of the dreaming that it represents. I show the dreaming with animals or people either going in or
coming out by using a tunnel which is part of the dreaming. The tunnel is
like a dimension you can go into it and come out of it.
It has spiritual significance and the hunters that I am painting are my
ancestors. They are the hunters that are now in the dreaming and the
animals that I paint they are respected because they come from the dream time also
We believe once the animals are hunted they go back into the dreamtime
they are not lost, they live on forever in the dreaming.
We have respect for the animals, all hunters do. If a hunter sees an emu
with chicks he will not touch that emu he leaves the lot for the next
generation to grow up. If he killed the adult emu he would also kill the
chicks because they would not be able to grow up and that means that there would be no increase to hunt next year or the year after.
Some of my boomerangs depict waterholes and around the waterholes you have rocks and sand to hold the water in. Any tracks that lead to the waterhole and around the waterhole all tell a story. They tell you how the animals walked in how they had a drink or if they were lying down after having a drink. I paint the tracks that I used to see and read in my hunting days. Some tracks lead into the picture and some out of the picture. In some pictures you see the animals are drinking from the waterhole and eating around the waterhole and of course in my pictures the animals also have shelter from the rain and the sun and the elements. It’s their environment I am painting.
On some I have traditional designs. Sand hills, sand dunes, rocks, a creek
bed and dry creek bed where the water runs underground when it is not
running on top and that water then seeps up into a waterhole.
Emus and kangaroos always eat together they look out for each other and they protect each other and give warning to each other they are always on watch always looking around.
And of course if you see an echidna on your hunting trip he is also good
tucker. The quills are used for needles and have many other uses such as
for tools and nothing is wasted.
There is also a lizard in my pictures. He is also watching and if you can’t see the lizard straight away he is always somewhere on the boomerang looking around.
On some paintings or boomerangs you can see tracks of the hunters and when they lead out you know that they didn’t get any animals. When the tracks stop you know that the hunter got the emu or kangaroo or whatever he was hunting.
On some of my boomerangs and paintings it shows the sunrise and all
the animals are warming themselves in the sun and having a drink of water and are looking for food.
The pictures show you what lives in that area. Every area has different
animals living in it but they all come to the water hole even the hunter
but the animals are very wary.
When the hunter gets to the water hole he can tell what animals have been there. The hunter can tell by the tracks how many emus and how many kangaroos and other animals have been to take a drink so he can then work out whether it is worth while hiding near the water hole because if there is plenty of animals he likely to get a feed.
But if there are very few tracks he can read that there are not very many
Animals. If there is one or two they are hard to catch so he will move
onto the next water hole and reads the signs. Because the other thing is if there are not too many animals around a waterhole the population is down the hunter leaves that area alone for a while so that the animals build up in numbers because if he hunts them all out he has nothing for the future.
Wombats are also valued as food. They are almost as good as the emu or
kangaroo. The goanna is also is much sought after but they are pretty
cunning and pretty fast and if they have a hole to slip down into that leaves the hunter standing .
On some boomerangs I am showing emu tracks and kangaroo tracks coming in.
On some paintings are traditional waterholes and the lines around them are the sand dunes. There are creek beds and you are likely to get water in the creek bed if you dig deep enough because there is always a river flowing underneath. The kangaroos and emus follow the creek bed until they find the waterhole. Sometimes I paint the animal tracks in different colours because I find that sometimes the tracks are harder to see than in other places so I use different colours. In my mind it shows me that the tracks are not easy to follow.
The stories I tell are those of the Coorong and the Murray or the Upper Murray and the Murray Mallee and they are all places where we used to hunt in my younger days.
All the pictures that I paint are painted from memory of what I used to
experience when I was young and went hunting.
The blue colours in my boomerangs are more of winter scenes.
A crispness or maybe the sky is overcast but the fields are green and there is plenty of food. The Coorong and Murray scenes also include fishing and netting scenes. Some whaling and egging. snakes, lizards, water rats Murray Cod, pelicans swans and other bird and fish life.
I have also utilised the mussels and I carve small animals on emu egg shells to make river or bush scenes. I carve the emu egg with the same stories and memories. Of course there is much of my present life there as well. One is always part of the dreaming because the dreaming is the past the present and the future.